Under the Skin

Let’s maybe stop consulting Scarlett Johansson about the meaning of Scarlett Johansson’s movies. Asked whether Under the Skin — the vaguely sci-fi nightmare that’s generating best-ever reviews for this most limited of actresses — functions as an indictment of sexual predation, she has said the movie is really just about “a lioness on the prowl, hunting.”

Hunting, sure, but nothing so leonine as Johannson’s guess. This is feral stuff, a pursuit made easier — made altogether simple, in fact — by the indiscriminate hetero-male libido. Also: hunting for an identity. Also: being hunted. That is, if Under the Skin is about anything other than director Jonathan Glazer’s restless, stealthy camera.

Glazer (Sexy Beast, Birth), co-writing (with Walter Campbell) an adaptation of Michel Faber’s far broader novel, here gives us a borderline-monotonous series of low-grade seductions, all of which end unfortunately for the men. It gives away little to say the prey here are destined to be ground into food for the alien species that has sent Johansson’s visitor to Earth. In fact, knowing her assignment might help you make sense of the film’s abstract, often wordless narrative.

Wordless but not soundless. The spinal-tap music, by Mica Levi (the Micachu of Micachu and the Shapes), and the punishingly specific sound design (if you can’t imagine what an empty, collapsing human epidermis sounds like now, you won’t forget this movie’s idea of it later) do as much as Glazer’s visuals to make Under the Skin an experience of pure dread.

But what are we to dread? A dark-wigged, dead-eyed Johansson, tooling around industrial Scotland in a big van, looking for loners with boners? Malevolent aliens with the power to assume not-quite-anatomically-correct human form? An earthbound loneliness so pervasive that even aliens find it alienating to walk among us?

Any of those makes an ample topic for, say, five minutes of post-movie conversation. The longer talk, though, centers on how minimal is too minimal. Much of Under the Skin simply traces and retraces the same long-beat rhythm. Spider collects fly, spider collects fly, spider collects fly. Some will find this hypnotic, primal. (I did, at first.) And some will find that even a spell not quite fully cast deserves a sharper last act.

But two sequences make Under the Skin impossible to set aside. One involves a rocky beach, a deadly tide and a young couple with a toddler and a dog. That’s a predictable enough template, yet Glazer’s choices (particularly lighting and editing) make this the most disturbing five minutes I can recall enduring in a theater. The other is almost a relief by comparison, the most sci-fi and explicatory point in the movie (don’t get excited — you still have to really squint to gather meaning) and also the most visually horrific. Like I said before, the sound of skin unfurled. Which still sounds better than Johansson’s English accent.